A Christian Constitution in a Secular World

Did the Founders believe the American experiment could survive without God?

(Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

When the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the cause of liberty, they believed it would take divine intervention to secure their freedom from Great Britain’s King George III. George Washington, a devout Christian who one former pastor at his church described as “so constant an attendant,” frequently spoke of divine providence, even referring to God’s favor as “essentially necessary to give this [Continental] Army the victory of all its enemies.”

While they did not establish a theocracy under the US Constitution, the Founding Fathers insisted that the American experiment needed the God of Christianity to survive. Now, 250 years later, can a constitution grounded in Christian principles survive an increasingly secular world?

A Christian Constitution

In the fall of 1798, President John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers, issued a prophetic warning about the future of the United States government in a letter to the Massachusetts Militia:

“Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Adams recognized that laws alone could not restrain a populace operating under the nation’s governing framework, a belief that was widely shared among the Founders. While they deliberately avoided using explicitly Christian language in the Constitution in order to protect religious liberty, the Founders still believed the God of Christianity would play a central role in the United States’ success.

“The name of the Lord (says the Scripture) is a strong tower; thither the righteous flee and are safe. Let us secure His favor and He will lead us through the journey of this life and at length receive us to a better,” Samuel Adams, known as the Father of the American Revolution, wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Adams on December 26, 1776.

“I conceive we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the Supreme Ruler of the world . . . that the confusions that are and have been among the nations may be overruled by the promoting and speedily bringing in the holy and happy period when the kingdoms of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be everywhere established, and the people willingly bow to the scepter of Him who is the Prince of Peace,” Adams later wrote as governor of Massachusetts.

Secular Modernity

The Founding Fathers rightly predicted that a secular population would put strain on the US Constitution. Issues like corruption and fraud that were once governed by faith are now increasingly managed by courts, agencies, and bureaucrats. When religious conviction retreats from public life, as it has, the federal government steps in to fill the moral void – a role the Constitution was never meant to fill.

After decades of growing secularism, the tide may finally be turning. The share of Americans who identify as Christians “shows signs of leveling off – at least temporarily – at slightly above six-in-ten,” according to a Pew Research Center survey. If the US Constitution needs Christianity to endure, as the Founders believed, then all hope is not lost.

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